ON JANUARY 18, 1940, B.R. Ambedkar stood before a Poona audience gathered to celebrate the 101st birth-anniversary of jurist, economist and the foremost social reformer of nineteenth-century Maharashtra, Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade. . He accepted the invitation reluctantly. He knew, as he later wrote in the preface, that his views on social and political problems "would not be very pleasing to the audience." He delivered the address anyway which ran for an hour and a half.
What emerged from that evening was one of the most conceptually rich texts in Ambedkar's body of work. Published in 1943, after reviews had already condemned it,Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah is a dissection of his two famous contemporaries– a tribute to Ranade, and a sustained argument for why social reform is not merely prior to political freedom but constitutive of it.
This article introduces you to the text. The argument is Ambedkar's. The words, where it matters most, are his own.
"Journalism in India was once a profession. It has now become a trade... To accept a hero and worship him has become its principal duty... Never has the interest of country been sacrificed so senselessly for the propagation of hero-worship."
Who makes a great man?
Ambedkar opens with a theoretical question that may seem academic but is, in fact, the engine of everything that followed: what makes a man great? He moved through Carlyle's test of sincerity, Rosebery's criterion of ‘natural power’ and genius, and a philosopher's notion of the great man as a "scourge and scavenger" born to cleanse society and lead it on to the right path to conclude that sincerity and intellect, while necessary, are not sufficient. A great man, according to him, must be "motivated by the dynamics of a social purpose."
By this measure, Ranade qualifies. A historian, economist, educationist, jurist; yet his title to greatness rested on a single overriding commitment– social reform. Ranade understood, in a way his opponents refused to, that Hindu society's political weakness was inseparable from its social deformation. His response to the fall of the Maratha Empire was not resignation. Ranade articulated a new faith, quoted Ambedkar:
"I profess implicit faith in two articles of my creed. This country of ours is the true land of promise. This race of ours is the chosen race."
Rights, however, Ambedkar insists, are not protected by law but by "the social and moral conscience of society."
Social reform before Swaraj
From this faith came a programme. Ranade identified the "weaknesses in the Hindu social system" as the root cause of political collapse and devoted his life to remedying them through meetings, journals, sermons, the Social Conference (an All-India Organization which ran as an adjunct to the Indian National Congress), and a relentless engagement with the intelligentsia that opposed him.
The political opposition Ranade faced is one of the text's most analytically powerful sections, and one that speaks directly to contemporary India. His opponents - led in varying degrees by Tilak and Chiplunkar - advanced a single, seductive thesis that political reform must come before social reform. Win independence first, fix society later.
Rights, however, Ambedkar insists, are not protected by law but by "the social and moral conscience of society." To illustrate this, he points to the Negroes in America, the Jews in Germany, and the Untouchables in India - groups with nominal legal protections and no social equality. For Ambedkar, a democratic form of government presupposes a democratic form of society. Without the latter, the former is, in his words, "a misfit."
In this context, he quotes Ranade's own warning to those who thought they could be liberal in politics while remaining conservative in religion:
"You cannot be liberal by halves. You cannot be liberal in politics and conservative in religion. The heart and the head must go together... It is an idle dream to expect men to remain enchained and enshackled in their own superstition and social evils, while they are struggling hard to win rights and privileges from their rulers…"
The manufacture of political greatness
Ambedkar argues that the politicians won the short-term battle. They captured the Congress and the popular imagination and thereby ensured the long-term deadlock. The communal problem that blocked India's political progress in 1940 was not a British creation but the consequence of a social system too undemocratic, tilted in favour of the classes,against the masses, class-conscious and communally minded.
Ambedkar described Gandhi and Jinnah as two men "so big that they could be identified without being named." He proceeds to identify them precisely, unflinchingly, and without apology.
"...it would be difficult to find two persons who would rival them for their colossal egotism, to whom personal ascendency is everything and the cause of the country a mere counter on the table. They have made Indian politics a matter of personal feud...By their domination they have demoralized their followers and demoralized politics. By their domination they have made half their followers fools and the other half hypocrites."
On role of journalism in enabling this domination, Ambedkar was equally direct and perhaps more relevant today than before:
"Journalism in India was once a profession. It has now become a trade... To accept a hero and worship him has become its principal duty... Never has the interest of country been sacrificed so senselessly for the propagation of hero-worship."
Against this backdrop of competitive paralysis, Ranade stood as a contrast. He had no stagecraft, subsidized press, or manufactured mystique. He "refused to be satisfied with the praises of fools and was never afraid of moving in the company of equals." He was a rationalist. He did not claim an inner voice.
"Journalism in India was once a profession. It has now become a trade... To accept a hero and worship him has become its principal duty... Never has the interest of country been sacrificed so senselessly for the propagation of hero-worship."
The failure of liberal politics
Ambedkar's treatment of Ranade is admirable but not uncritical. He identifies a real limitation in Ranade's legacy, i.e., the collapse of Liberal Party. By remaining a man of the classes, by failing to build a mass organisation, and by placing too much faith in the self-propagating power of ideas, Ranade bequeathed to his followers a philosophy without a machine. "The Liberal Party has only the High Command. It has no machine. Not having any machine, the high command is only a shadow... The Liberal Party does not believe in mass contact. It would be difficult to imagine a party so completely isolated and insulated from the main mass of people," Ambedkar said.
Yet Ambedkar did not reject Ranade’s philosophy. He wanted to rescue it from its followers' inaction. For Ambedkar, Ranade’s political philosophy remains sound: ideals must be practicable, sentiment and temperament matter more than theory, and in political negotiations the rule must be what is possible. Therefore, what is needed is propagation, organization, and mass contact.
Three lessons for Contemporary India
Ambedkar wrote this address in 1940 and revised it for publication in 1943. His preface captures the spirit of the whole:
"I have been a critic, and I must continue to be such. Maybe I am making mistakes, but I have always felt that it is better to make mistakes than to accept guidance and direction from others or to sit silent and allow things to deteriorate."
Three claims from this text deserve particular attention in any contemporary reading. First, political democracy is impossible without social democracy. A constitutional arrangement built on a caste-stratified society will reproduce domination, not dissolve it. Second, hero-worship is not an innocent cultural trait but a structural political problem. It bars criticism, concentrates on power, and makes public life "grossly commercialized." Third, ideas require organisations, not just apostles. The Liberal Party did not fail because its ideas were wrong. It failed because those ideas were never carried to the masses.